Juan Goytisolo's wars: literature and journalism in Sarajevo, Palestine, Chechnya ...

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On July 14, 1993,

landed aboard a UN plane in the martyr city of

, subjected to the merciless siege of Serbian artillery.

At the age of 62, the Spanish writer, encouraged by his friend Susan Sontag, has become a special war envoy to bear witness to the Bosnian war in the pages of

.

On his way from the airport to the Holiday Inn hotel, corseted in a bulletproof vest, Goytisolo contemplates the destruction through the peephole of an armored tank of the blue helmets: "Streets and entire buildings have disappeared, neither trams nor buses circulate, the Voivode Putnika is desperately empty, the trees have been felled, people are crouching in their hiding places, "he writes.

"

you must get used to sleeping, moving around, walking, with a clear awareness of your helplessness and precariousness. Nothing guarantees that the crosshairs of an elite shooter has not suddenly fixed on your insignificant person or that a grenade or shell explodes inside your home. "

With the help of young reporters Alfonso Armada and Gervasio Sánchez, the novelist who became a reporting correspondent travels the city interviewing its inhabitants, from the Kosevo hospital to the

, from the "Avenida de los Francotiradores" to the makeshift cemeteries, and the following month he publishes, with photos of Sánchez, his series

, the report with the most international circulation in the history of the Spanish press.

The future

and author of milestones in fiction literature such as

or

lives during those days one of the most profound experiences of his life, since the victims of ultranationalism with whom he meets in the cosmopolitan heart of the Balkans enliven in him his

, when his mother was killed in an aviation bombardment of Mussolini, an ally of Franco, on his native Barcelona, ​​and witnessed the exodus of the defeated Republicans on the way from the border of France.

His

leads him to return twice during the bleeding of the former Yugoslav republic, in January 1994 and August 1995. He was proud to have been, on this third trip, one of the first to interview a survivor of Srebrenica, the greatest genocide in Europe since

(the hecatomb whose evolution he studied every day as a teenager, devouring the news of the newspapers and examining the battle fronts of Nazis and allies on maps).

Goytisolo, passionate about the intellectual and civic mission opened with

, between the report and the essay, continues his extraordinary cycle as a witness and reporter of conflicts at the end of the 20th century traveling to Algiers (

, 1994), Palestine (

, 1995) and Grozny (

, 1996).

He grouped the four series in the book

(2001).

The siege of the Bosnian capital, the terrifying duel between the State and Islamists in Algeria, the old conflict over the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank and the rebellion of the pro-independence in Chechnya crushed with blood and fire by the Russian army had as a common denominator, as he points out in volume VIII of his

(2010), being "the

religious, nationalist and ideological

that ravage today's globalized planet, fundamentalisms that instead of domesticating the beast that we carry inside reversed its savagery and ferocity. "

His war reports from the 1990s are not an isolated journalistic foray into his long work.

, in situ and "de visu", as he said, looking face to face at the events and their protagonists, during his 60-year career, which are a complete portrait of the 20th century.

The texts of

are framed in a constant trajectory of attachment to reality and of combat against its ideological distortions, of desire to understand the other, of criticism of injustices, of eagerness to cross borders and, in his words, "to know and make known a necessarily partial truth, like all the truths in the world."

In the 50s, 60s and 70s, he traveled through Spain, Cuba, Algeria, Morocco, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, Europe and North America.

As a

at the time of his military service in Mataró, he sympathizes with the migrant recruits from Almeria or Murcia who will encourage him to travel through the poor southeast of Spain and write his first travel stories (Campos de Níjar, La Chanca);

installed in Paris with his wife, Monique Lange, and circumstantial colleague of his later admired

at the Gallimard publishing house, he collaborates with large French publications such as France Observateur, who sent him to cover as a clandestine special envoy in Spain the first strikes under the Franco dictatorship.

He attends the beginnings of

, where he meets

.

Secret interview with Palestinian guerrillas in their Jordanian fiefdom.

He travels several times to the revolutionary Cuba of Castro, where he writes his report

and witnesses the missile crisis on a military base (wearing a military uniform as an embedded reporter), until he breaks with the regime due to its drift authoritarian.

In 1968 he was in Prague to document the

in a long report, which has not been republished since then, for

Sartre's

.

These were years in which he became friends with the writers of the Latin American boom, including two who also practice narrative journalism, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez.

His work with a reporter profile continued in the 1980s with his explorations in Turkey and Morocco (from his home in Marrakech), published in the magazine

and collected in the book

 (1990).

His journalistic and anthropological journeys through the

extended from Iran to Mali and from Uzbekistan to the Palestinian Intifada when, as a scriptwriter and presenter, he shot with the director Rafael Carratalá the series Alquibla for Spanish Television between 1987 and 1990 (the scripts make up his 1997 book From the Mint to Mecca).

From Alquibla, he made the leap in the 90s to reporting as a

, armed only with a pencil, notebook and camera.

His work as a traveler and chronicler lasted until 2011, six years before his death, when, at the age of 80, he made his last major report on the street, on the Arab Spring revolution in Cairo.

He still has the strength to publish a short piece in 2012 about his stay in Hugo Chávez's Caracas.

The wars of Goytisolo (1936-1996).

An Essay on Reporting from Sarajevo, Algeria, Palestine and Chechnya

, an upcoming book based on my doctoral thesis, narrates her journey in search of truth through journalism, literature, history, culture and ethics.

It also shows that

Juan Goytisolo's

reporting

, so rare in Spanish literature, is not a minor but a

, and that it continues to deserve a reading today, as an example of informative, documentary and expressive rigor.

His commitment was to reality, not to propaganda.

Eduardo del Campo is the author of a doctoral thesis on Juan Goytisolo's reporterism, which will soon appear in the book 'Las guerras de Goytisolo (1936-1996)', through a crowdfunding campaign on Libros.com.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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